


the many lives of

by ravenbringslight



Series: Prompt Collections [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Eating Disorders, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Serious Injuries, Sibling Incest, Vikings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2020-06-24 20:29:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19731211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenbringslight/pseuds/ravenbringslight
Summary: Twitter prompts.1. Appetite - surfer Thor2. Tongues - Vikings3. Storms - Loki





	1. Appetite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for mona: "I'm currently jonesing for some summer bois!Thorki, specifically something to do with surfing. If you ever feel so inclined."
> 
> loki's got a little bit of an eating disorder in this one

Loki hates the beach. He goes every day anyway, slathering his face and neck with sunscreen and covering himself with long sleeves and a wide-brimmed hat. There’s a spot where Loki camps out. Umbrella and blankets and cooler, a kindle he only pretends to read. Far enough away from the dunes to avoid the bugs, but not so close to the water that he gets wet.

He goes for Thor.

Thor must have been a fish in another life, Loki thinks, or maybe he was simply born out of the sea foam like Aphrodite on her shell. Loki isn’t certain that even the goddess of love and beauty herself could take his breath away like his brother does.

Today, Loki lies on his stomach, bare feet up in the air, ankles crossed. The waves aren’t very big; the weather is too nice. Loki wonders if he might burn through his sunscreen. Thor’s surfboard cuts across the sparkling water. Loki tracks him without moving his head, eyes safely hidden behind his giant dark sunglasses. Watches the muscles of his back and ass shift and ripple through his painted-on wetsuit.

A familiar emptiness tugs at Loki’s stomach. He’d mistake it for hunger if he didn’t know better, although he is hungry too. He almost always is. He picks at a chip in his nail polish.

Thor comes back dripping, board tucked under his arm. His new haircut is sticking out crazy in every direction, clumped together with seawater, sand, and sunscreen, and his smile is so wide that Loki can’t help but smile back.

“What?” Loki says suspiciously.

“Nothing,” Thor says, plopping down next to him. “What did you pack us for lunch today?”

“Oh, was I supposed to bring food for you?” Loki says airily. “So sorry.”

Thor leans over Loki’s back and scrubs his hands through his hair, spraying him with water and making him squeak, and Loki rolls onto his back and plants his feet in the middle of Thor’s chest and shoves him away. Victory is short-lived; Thor grabs his feet and starts tickling them. Loki can’t escape no matter how he flails, and Thor doesn’t relent until their stomachs hurt from laughing.

Loki only eats half his sandwich, saying the sun stole his appetite, and Thor eats the rest of it for him without saying a word.

“I have to work this afternoon,” Thor says. His hand rests on Loki’s ankle, rubbing at the bone.

“I know.”

Loki goes home and spends the rest of the afternoon at his laptop, trying to write. Tapping out a few sentences, deleting one, rearranging the words until they more closely resemble the feeling in his head. His mind is a wall of white noise today. Simultaneously too noisy, yet telling him nothing of value. He makes himself coffee. Thinks of the little seabirds at the beach, running back and forth across the sand at the edges of the surf, their tiny legs a blur. Breathes out and imagines his breath is the wind through the grass on the dunes.

Thor comes in late, the smell of the sun on his skin. He soaks up so much of it that Loki wonders if his cells are mostly sunlight by this point. It certainly feels that way; he’s hot under Loki’s hands, his lips.

“Hey,” Thor says gently, pulling away from Loki’s kiss. Loki’s hands run up his sides under his shirt, seeking. “Bad afternoon?”

“Yeah.”

Thor doesn’t say anything else for a moment, just cradles Loki’s jaw in his hands and thumbs at his cheek. Kisses the corner of his mouth, then rubs the tip of his nose against it. Loki’s stomach yawns, and he leans into the touch. He’s so _empty_.

“How do you want me, baby?” Thor murmurs.

Loki pushes Thor onto the bed, or maybe Thor pulls him down. Loki lets Thor wrap his arms and legs around him, lets his brother hold him together even though he feels like flying apart. He gets a hand on Thor’s ass and squeezes. 

“Can I?” he whispers.

Having Thor spread out underneath him never ceases to fill Loki with amazement. There’s so much of him. Twice Loki’s size, twice his self-assurance, twice his heart. Maybe this is why Loki feels like half a person most of the time; Thor got some of his share. The closest Loki will ever know to feeling complete is when they’re together.

When the head of his cock slips inside his brother’s body, Loki can’t help the devastated little noise that escapes him, and his eyes fall shut. Thor pulls him down and kisses his eyelids until he opens them again, and won’t let him look away until they’re joined flush together.

“Stay with me,” Thor says, pushing Loki’s hair behind his ear and mouthing at his jaw. “Don’t go away.”

“Where would I go?” Loki says. He rolls his hips pointedly and Thor groans and pushes up against him.

“I don’t know. Wherever you go when you close your eyes.”

“I’m always with you,” Loki says, and it’s the truth.

Funny, Loki thinks, that it takes emptying himself to ever feel full.

He plasters himself to Thor’s side afterwards. Kisses the sweat from his chest, lapping up some of that sunlight to make a part of himself. Thor strokes his hair, cradles his head, and Loki breathes out, the wind through the sea grass.

“Are you going surfing again tomorrow?”

“Mmm.”

“I’ll come too.”


	2. Tongues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for Cuppy: "⚡️Viking ⚔️ Thorki 🐍 where Loki calls Thor a Drengr in bed!"
> 
> some brotherly Viking hurt/comfort

Loki is the first one into the water when the longboats come in. He splashes out into the surf, ready to see Thor’s face smiling down at him as he throws the rope for Loki to help haul them in. It’s Fandral he sees instead, and Loki’s heart climbs into his throat. He catches the rope with fingers already going numb from the frigid ocean and begins pulling.

“Where is he?” Loki demands when they’re on the shore, before Fandral is even off the boat. He hears the hysteria in his own voice, feels the hands pulling at his arms, trying to hold him back, but he throws them off. “ _Where is he?_ ”

“He’s here,” Fandral says. His eyes say more, words he doesn’t speak, and Loki wants to scream.

They carry Thor off the boat. It’s wrong, to see his brother hanging so limply. Head rolling back, hands flopping at the wrists. A bandage stained with old brown blood covers half his face. Loki feels so small, nothing more than a tiny speck at the edge of the vast water, and he covers his face with his hands and shakes.

It’s three days before Thor opens his eye. There’s only the one left, Loki found to his dismay once the bandages were unwound. Loki is dozing with his head on the mattress at Thor’s side and his bottom falling asleep on the rush-strewn floor when he feels fingers threading through his hair, gentle, and in a flash he’s up, seizing Thor’s hands and kissing his knuckles, running his hands up his arms, his vision hazy with tears that he refuses to let fall.

“Brother,” Thor croaks, his voice dusty and cracked.

“I’m here,” Loki says.

Loki has been here the whole time, won’t let anyone else touch Thor at all. Has been ignoring his own health and his duties and everything else in favor of his brother. If Thor were to die while he wasn’t there, what would be the point of any of the rest of it? He doesn’t say any of that, though. Instead he helps Thor struggles to sit and fetches water for his parched throat, then helps tip the cup when Thor is too weak, and massages his throat when even swallowing proves a difficulty.

“My head,” Thor says, bringing his hand gingerly to his temple.

“Shh, don’t touch,” Loki says. He takes Thor’s hand and folds it into his own.

“Hurts.”

Loki’s heart aches. “I know, _kærr_.”

“Don’t go,” Thor says, his voice suddenly frightened, his good eye wild, and he clutches at Loki’s hand too harshly. Loki wonders what he’s seeing.

“I’m here,” Loki says again, and clutches back.

It’s only a matter of days before Thor is out of bed, smiling, boasting of his exploits with the rest of the men of the village. It had been a successful raid, all told. A month out plundering the richest coastal farms and monasteries they could find, their holds growing fatter with valuables and slaves until the boats rode low in the water and demanded they return home. Thor’s eye is a fine trade in everyone’s estimation. Not in Loki’s. Thor’s eye wasn’t anyone else’s to take. 

Thor is the one with the injury, and yet Loki feels like he’s the one who has changed. 

He doesn’t have the words to speak about it, and he wouldn’t say them even if he did. But if he did have the words, and the willingness to let them pass his lips, they might sound something like this:

I’ve never been so scared in my life.

Now I’m scared at how scared I was.

It makes me want to run away, to hide my heart somewhere safe, so that it can’t break the way I now know it can.

I still feel so small.

The day you die, they should build a barrow large enough for two, for I’ll not be long behind you.

I love you.

More than that.

More than that, too.

I never want to let you out of my sight again.

Instead, Loki worries his lip with his teeth, and worries his hands together, and says nothing. While Thor is out helping with the harvest as best he can, Loki stays back and does everything else; mends their clothes and boots, cleans, cooks, does the laundry, fetches water, makes soap, changes the rushes, sharpens the tools, splits the firewood, and on and on. Thor tires early and comes home to rest in the afternoons, and Loki is there to help him into bed. To take his shoes off, and wash his wound, and sometimes his hair. To change his dressings. To hand him a warm bowl of soup. To send him off to sleep with a story or a lullaby, and to drop kisses on his brow once he’s deep enough in slumber not to notice how long Loki lets his lips linger.

At least, Loki thinks he’s been saying nothing.

Thor, however, is fluent in many tongues.

He’s sitting up in bed, hands folded in his lap, his good eye closed while Loki gently washes the other.

“Little brother,” Thor murmurs, “why do you gaze upon me so intently?”

Loki pauses. “You can’t even see me,” he says lightly, though his heart flutters. “How do you know what I’m doing?”

Thor’s eye opens, piercing blue nearly hidden by the dark fan of his lashes.

“Do you deny it?” Thor asks. His voice is mild. As if he is just idly curious.

Loki swallows and withdraws his hand. Dips his cloth into the bowl of water in his lap to have something to do.

“I don’t know,” Loki says. “I did not...did not realize.”

Thor’s hand covers his own and stills it. Thor takes the bowl and sets it on the table next to the bed, then takes Loki’s hands in his own, thumbs stroking his knuckles, and Loki tries not to tremble like a leaf in the wind.

“Are you frightened?” Thor asks, and, horrifyingly, Loki nods.

Thor tugs him closer. Kisses his knuckles one by one. Loki doesn’t know where to cast his eyes, so he closes them. He should leave. He can’t leave. He can’t move, or breathe.

“I think I may know why you gaze upon me so,” Thor says. “I think perhaps it’s the same reason that I come back earlier and earlier every day despite feeling stronger and stronger.”

“Thor—”

Loki doesn’t have time to say anything else before Thor pulls him completely onto the bed, half sprawled over Thor’s chest, and wraps his arms tightly around him. Oh, Loki is so small and helpless in his grasp, just like he has been since that day in the water, just like he always wants to be; tiny enough to crawl into Thor’s heart and live there, to hide, to be with him always, and love him and care for him and protect him. Be protected by him.

He hugs Thor back the best he can, and they cling to each other for long minutes, until Loki can hear Thor’s heart slow down from its thunderous pace. It gives Loki courage, in an odd way, to hear the evidence that he isn’t the only one affected. Thor’s arms loosen enough for Loki to rearrange himself, to slide off of Thor’s chest and onto his side facing him, and Thor turns on his side as well. He’s still so handsome despite the wound marring the right side of his face.

“You called me _kærr_ ,” Thor says softly. Loki can only look back at him, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. _Beloved._ He’d nearly forgotten. Thor kisses his forehead and Loki’s eyes fall shut. He feels a gentle touch on his cheek.

“Here?” Thor asks. Loki nods, and feels the press of Thor’s lips against his skin.

Thor touches the hinge of his jaw. “Here?” Loki tilts his face and Thor kisses there too.

“Here?” Thor whispers, and Loki opens his eyes, and meets Thor halfway.

The harvest gives way to winter snows and darkness, the winter snows and darkness to the spring melt and the sun, just like they always do. Loki has different words living inside him now:

I’ve never been happier in my life.

The ducks will be laying soon, I can make us eggs with wild onion from the field by the stream.

If Thor tries to go raiding again after the planting I’ll tie him to the bed.

I wonder if Thor would like it if I used my tongue on his—

I’m not alone.

Maybe an eye was worth all of this, though I wish it had been my own.

Gods, Thor, you _drengr_ , do that again, do that agai—

I love you.

More than that.

More than that, too.

Loki doesn’t say any of them out loud, but he says them all the same, and Thor, fluent in all the tongues Loki could ever speak, understands—and loves him back.


	3. Storms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A ragnarok deleted scene was just released where Odin told Loki that he had storms inside him. Sorry not sorry for this

When Loki was younger, and he and Thor first explored each other's bodies with shaking hands, words weren’t yet his strength. He didn’t know how to speak the enormity of the storm that lived in his chest and bore his brother’s name, and so instead he kissed it into Thor’s fingertips, every press of his lips a poem newly written, and then Thor’s fingertips transferred them to Loki’s skin, where they were set indelibly by the heat of their passion.

Maybe that was why, later, Loki could never seem to untangle himself from Thor no matter how hard he tried. He’d done it to himself. He'd tied that knot as fast as any thread the Norns themselves had set their thrice-fated hands on, and he had as little hope of cutting it as he did of cutting the roots of Yggdrasil.

Maybe that was why, at the end of it all, Loki walked to his death willingly. He offered himself up in place of his brother--one half of a whole, a blood-soaked feather to balance the Titan's hungry scales, and this time no stranger to the power his words could possess. His lips were full of double meanings that only Thor knew how to hear properly. He hoped that Thor might forgive him this cowardice; death was the easy path when faced with a lifetime that was motherless, fatherless, brotherless.

He wondered if there might be a storm to mark his passing.

That would be good. It would be fitting.

"The sun will shine on us again," Loki promised.

He meant it.

Storm's end brought the sun, always.


End file.
